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Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

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Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#61

Post by Kiro »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #36
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the company is doing shitty things doesn't mean that every engineer does. Plus, imagine how it could work in reality. You finally got your place at Google. You know what the company is doing. And at some point you are asked to work on one of these grey things. What do you say, that it's immoral? If so, where exactly do you draw the line? Who is to decide what's still acceptable and what not? You've known…

It is immoral. Perfectly legal or not. I know why they do it. They like the money. They like the perks. They like the feeling of being in a special elite group. Google does not have to be evil. It just is. The technical employees of Google could change it overnight if they cared.

That's just your opinion. I don't think they are evil or that working there is immoral.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#62

Post by londons_explore »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #31
scoobyyabbadoo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? We don't work at Google, we use Google services

The Goog employees, several who comment here at HN, could stop it tomorrow. Not plebes like you and me.

If you think you can solve it, come apply for a job at Google.

This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#63

Post by harrisonjackson »

I'd suspect a competitor flagged your app somehow. This seems to be a trending dark pattern. Across a lot of competitive platforms - Amazon Sellers, App Store, Play Store - even social media people are flagging content as abusive to hurt competing brands.

Since normal support channels don't work, maybe report this to a bug bounty - this would be considered a type of social hack, right? Someone or something convinced their app review system to flag your apps and eventually have them removed.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#64

Post by foepys »

robk wrote: post #48
dollar wrote: post #3

The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “polic…

Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.

Until then they are happy to get paid by advertisers to show ads on spam sites?

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#65

Post by sandos »

I have a strong feeling that this will soon happen to my Play Store account. I did some very lax hobby development many years ago (my biggest app was also transit related!), and my account has basically been inactive with just a few apps. I guess its enough that 1 human somewhere reports my apps for anything and Im gone from the Play Store, which would be a bit sad. I still remember thinking it was so awesome that developing for android was so simple, and free!

That seems to be disappearing.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#66

Post by pnw_hazor »

robk wrote: post #48
dollar wrote: post #3

The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “polic…

Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.

Meanwhile they collect money from the advertisers.

Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps?

I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud.

However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#67

Post by i_feel_great »

forcer wrote: post #15

We were suspended once for serving deceptive ads. Yet the only ad network we use is Google Adsense. We had to remove Google Ads to be allowed back in.

Ah, the ol' "Do as we say and not as we do" clause by Google, huh.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#68

Post by antoinevg »

ddalex wrote: post #38
pnw_hazor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes incoming! Other explanations from Google programmers: "the work is interesting"

Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfo…

The real world is also hard and you also cannot make everyone happy.

Which is why we invented DUE PROCESS.

Re: Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app

#69

Post by ddalex »

onli wrote: post #49
ddalex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having worked at Google yet, but having plenty of experience with other big companies: things are not black and white. There is no "evil" per se, it's just a shit load of conflicting interests, different priorities and different pressures at play: nobody wakes up in the morning and decides "I'm gonna fuck up this webmasters day today for the sake of it". It just happens that some innocent people end up in an unfo…

This is not about making everybody happy. This is about completely wrong behaviour: You can suspend scammers fast, but if you also catch legitimate developers with your scam protection you have to have processes in place to give 1. valid explanations why 2. time to react, at least retroactively 3. a legitimate possibility to appeal. Google does none of that, fixing that process is possible and has nothing to do with…

How do you know who is a legitimate dev and who is a scammer posing as a legitimate dev, to know when to work with someone, or to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?

Mind, it's not that this dev got one app banned, he got ALL of them banned. There is an appeal process when you gone one banned, but he got multiple violations. He got all the violations in a span of hours, so he got unlucky to be a corner case that the regular appeal process no longer works for him. So you might argue that the appeal process is not flexible enough, but then the question is what would be flexible enough? So no matter for how long you're tweaking it, you're gonna have corner cases that will make people unhappy.

On the adsense scam, I hear the reports, but I've not seen Google lose in a small-claims court yet. Given the amount of money Google makes on there, I doubt that the revenue from running such a scam would even register as a blip, never mind the reputation hit they would take should it be ever proved true.

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